Sharknado, Syfy’s latest guilty pleasure for the B-movie crowd, hit social media last week like, quite frankly, a swirling tornado of bloodthirsty sharks.

The show debuted at 9 p.m. EST last Thursday night. By 10:58 p.m., it peaked at over 5,000 tweets per minute according to Fox News. That’s an impressive nearly 80 tweets per second. That’s nowhere close to the record of more than 5,000 tweets per second set after Obama’s second presidential election win, but still a huge trending topic by the social network’s standards.

“It took a long time, and it was a lot of work from marketing and our press people to get people to understand that we know that you know that we know, that we want you to know that we know what we’re doing,” said Thomas Vitale, Syfy’s executive vice-president of programming.

It could have been because of this learning curve that previous SyFy movies in the same vein as to Sharknado, such as Sharktopus or Arachnoquake never managed to really capture the same amount of public attention. Vitale points to another possible factor – the fact that even a few years ago, social media didn’t have the power to make or break a movie.

“Now, it drives engagement”the median viewer age for Sharknado (46.8) was the network’s lowest for a movie since 2011’s Zombie Apocalypse, a feat that a network spokesperson attributes to Twitter”and helps the network gauge not just how many people are talking but what exactly they’re talking about and when.”

The combination of a ridiculous yet self-aware premise, visual effects that put Snakes on a Plane on par with Life of Pi, and its cast of D-list stars proved to be the perfect ingredients for Twitter.  The interest it captured ranged from a cult following, which the movie seemed to quickly acquire thanks to a trailer that went viral, to unflattering attention from either snarky film fans or people in the film industry.

Lost writer Damon Lindelof jokingly tweeted during the movie, “I am going to write the Sharknado sequel and I am going to do it before Shaknado is over.”

NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd observed, “I follow about a thousand folks. Every one of them tweeting about SharkNado.”

TV performers chimed in as well.

“If Ian Zeiring is not in a shark movie. It’s not a good shark movie,” tweeted 30 Rock star Judah Friedlander.

Michael Chiklis, whose most recent vehicle Vegas was just canceled by CBS, tweeted, “Oh Godd**n it, now I want to see it too and then I’m gonna want to quit the business . . . again!”

Comedian Horatio Sanz tweeted something reminiscent of a monologue joke from his SNL days, “I wish I could join in on the shenanigans, But I had a cousin that was killed by a #Sharknado back in ’93.”

A brief glance at Twitter metrics via Topsy reveals just what a viral sensation Sharknado was in a 24-hour span, one that seemed to come out of nowhere.  A graph measuring mentions of the show last Thursday looks like Mt. Fuji’s profile.  The most popular link at the time of this writing had to do with a sequel being in the works.

It remains to be seen whether its social media buzz translates into actual ratings. A preliminary Nielsen report indicates that in this case it did not, but more will be known when the final report is out.

And if you missed it, enjoy the trailer and rest assured that SyFy will rerun it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iwsqFR5bh6Q

Source: LA Times